"Language was invented for one reason, and one reason alone. To woo women..." Mississippi grinned down at her. "The Japanese aren't great at that, in aggragate. That's why their culture used to be so repressed about the whole thing, and now it's showing through the cracks in a really weird way. But in the end, the language isn't it's land of origin. There's nothing but poetry on that island's landscape. Well... poetry and fascinating animals. And a few odd ideas about how to handle cattle." Mississippi shrugged, half to himself. "But yeah, nights under canvas count. Or under a musquito net in a hut, that counts too. I've done a bit of both, through college and from time to time after. I was almost sad when I realized they were sending me to what they are essentially hoping to make into Earth, the sequel."

He shrugged again. "As you can probably imagine, they didn't see fit to march me past the reading and writing department 'efore hiring me. Else I'd have met you already." He considered that Maryland was north of the Potomic and hadn't seceded during the War of Northern Aggression (and likely didn't call it that, either), and figured they had buyer's remorse or something akin to it. "Washington D.C. ought to look into that. If Maryland decides it's a Southern state we're gonna have the capital surrounded." He chuckled, seeing as that had no baring on anything anymore. It would have surely been a call for alarm in the mid to late 1800s, though.

"You feel free to point 'em out, Miss Ruth. Even amongst the office sitters in my neck of science you don't find many people who speak three whole languages, and there's not many more that fluently speak two that's useful." There were plenty that were conversational in some tribal tongue, but it was usually a tribal tongue that wasn't spoken more than 20 miles away in any direction and had no word for 'toilet paper'. Not that there was anything wrong with such cultures, but Mississippi hadn't gotten into Zoology because he was wildly fascinated by people. "Thems the ones with snakes in their chests or the ones with snakes in their heads?"